We’ve been talking about the environmental costs of manufacturing and disposal. But there’s energy expended everywhere, and environmental costs usually throughout.
What you say about transportation’s impact on a product’s overall environmental cost is true. It is perhaps possible that certain kinds of foam and petrochemicals manufactured very close to my home could possibly be greener overall than exotic wood (or manufactured plywood), hemp (farming energy utilized, processing, manufacturing done to it), and green resins (again, farming costs, energy expended to isolate, purify, package) that had to be transported thousands of miles in trucks, ships, trains, trucks, and my car, etc.
There are economies of scale in farming, manufacturing, processing, transportation of goods, including the environmental costs.
So buying a single exotic high-energy-manufacturing packaged material to be delivered by individual transportation in a special trip is an opposite pole.
With surfboards, you have disposal issues too, and aside from disposability, the disposable nature of traditional Clark foam pu/pe boards is an enviro/landfill issue. How many boards are manufactured globally annually? How many are disposed of, and how?
What we are contemplating/after is a surfboard that is as green as possible, from cradle to grave. Distilled down to the purest: local wood and organic environmentally-neutral resins that break down in less than 50 years. (Yes, you’d have to re-do your noserider in 30-40 years. But if you didn’t, it would at least rot!)
You surf. Think about this: carbon dioxide we are responsible for
is right now being absorbed by the oceans in astronomical amounts, said
CO2 being converted to carbolic acid, which is changing the pH of the
ocean toward acidity, which dissolves calcium-based coral reefs.
And that’s just one thing.